Tired of feeling starved for time? Try spending it on someone else, says a new paper by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Harvard Business School and Yale School of Management.

Cutting back on commitments is the usual response to feeling harried, but the new research—to be published in a coming issue of Psychological Science—found that people who donated time to others actually experienced feelings of “time affluence,” a sense of having ample time to complete other tasks.

A person need not give away whole days, but even small tasks—editing a friend’s résumé, making the morning coffee run, volunteering with a charity—can provide a sense of accomplishment, and the more accomplished one feels, the more time they feel they have, said Michael Norton, a marketing professor at Harvard and co-author of the study.